1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to improvements in power converters. More particularly, the invention uses clamping diodes to transfer excess energy to a storage capacitor to temporarily store the excess energy until it can be recycled back into the host power converter. In particular, the present invention relates specifically to an active energy recovery clamp circuit including a clamping circuit and a regenerative converter.
2. Description of the Known Art
As will be appreciated by those skilled in the art, power supply topologies are known in various forms. Patents disclosing information relevant to power supplies include: U.S. Pat. No. 8,427,120, issued to Cilio on Apr. 23, 2013 entitled Coupled inductor output filter; U.S. Pat. No. 4,703,409, issued to Spreen on Oct. 27, 1987 which is entitled Coupled power supply inductors for reduced ripple current; U.S. Pat. No. 7,317,305, issued to Stratakos et al. on Jan. 8, 2008 which is entitled Method and apparatus for multi-phase dc-dc converters using coupled inductors in discontinuous conduction mode; U.S. Pat. No. 7,449,867, issued to Wu et al. on Nov. 11, 2008 which is entitled Multi-phase buck converter with a plurality of coupled inductors; and U.S. Pat. No. 7,498,783, issued to Johnson on Mar. 3, 2009 which is entitled Extending the continuous mode of operation for a buck converter. Patents and/or applications relating to coupled inductors also include the basic electrical components of the present design as noted by United States Patent No. 2009/0179713 filed by Zeng et al. published on Jul. 16, 2009 entitled Low pass filter incorporating coupled inductors to enhance stop band attenuation. Each of these patents and applications is hereby expressly incorporated by reference in their entirety.
From these prior references it may be seen that these prior art patents are very limited in their teaching and utilization, and an improved active energy recovery clamp is needed to overcome these limitations.